Terms of Service

If you sign up for a service today, you probably will encounter the Terms of Service of said service. How many of you actually read this? I certainly don't. Click the checkbox and get on moving — what am I, a lawyer?

Nonetheless, occasionally, you do take a glance at the Terms of Service. What secrets hide in these elusive terms? Turns out, some legal teams probably had a bit too much fun.

Apple iTunes

This is probably the most famous case. iTunes is (was) an insanely popular music purchasing and playing service created by Apple. And, like all good services, they have an excellent Terms of Service handcrafted by their crack legal team. Here is an excerpt of it:

• You may use the Services and Content only for personal, noncommercial purposes (except as set forth in the App Store Content section below or as otherwise specified by Apple).

Wait...that's the normal part, here is the questionable part:

You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture, or production of nuclear, missile, or chemical or biological weapons.

Please email me if this is a factually incorrect statement: To my knowledge, there is no way to use or involve Apple iTunes in the creation or operation of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.

However, Apple, a multi-trillion-dollar company, probably wants to cover all their bases.

You can read the full Terms of Service for iTunes here, though the rest of it is unsurprisingly boring.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a microblogging platform, and like all social-media-adjacent platforms, it contains usernames. How should you use these usernames though? What restrictions are imposed upon these? In an older version of Tumblr's Community Guidelines, it was stated:

Tumblr's usernames/URLs are meant for the use and enjoyment of all of our users. Don't squat, hoard, amass, accumulate, accrue, stockpile, rack up, buy, trade, sell, launder, invest in, ingest, get drunk on, cyber with, grope, or jealously guard Tumblr usernames/URLs.

I am not quite sure how the logistics of getting drunk on a Tumblr username would work, but obviously someone at Tumblr has been thinking about it. I also imagine that ingesting usernames is quite a challenge, but I cannot find a source to back this up as of now. It seems like this was removed from a more recent version, the User Guidelines, but you can still find it in the version history of their GitHub Repository.

Amazon Lumberyard

Amazon Lumberyard was a free game engine that allowed developers to build games for a multitude of platforms and made it easy to tie them into Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Twitch. It, of course, had a Terms of Service document. As far as I can tell, this document, the AWS Service Terms, is no longer available from Amazon with information on Lumberyard, but, thankfully, the Wayback Machine has the site archived from 2016. It can be accessed here.

In this document, it is stated:

57.10 ... The Lumberyard Materials are not intended for use with life-critical or safety-critical systems, such as use in operation of medical equipment, automated transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, aircraft or air traffic control, nuclear facilities, manned spacecraft, or military use in connection with live combat. However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.

It seems like Amazon knows something that we do not. They seem to think that civilization as we know it will end through a zombie apocalypse, and that the CDC could possibly fall in the process, with a successor taking its place. Most peculiarly, somehow this now defunct game engine will save the day, possibly in a manned spacecraft or nuclear facility. I would propose two possibilities to solve this conundrum: Either Amazon is just joking, or, more likely, they are disguising their cure to all ailments across the planet in this obsolete game engine.

On a more serious note

While this is all fun and games, it does show a critical weakness exposed by users of the Internet. It is far too easy to blindly agree to terms which are unfair for the user, without ever knowing better. Purple AI, a company that provides WiFi services for businesses and other venues, added in a clause to their terms that required users to do 1,000 hours of community service, including "providing hugs to stray cats and dogs". 22,000 users agreed to this over a two-week period with only one person notifying them of the situation. When people are in a rush, they tend to not enjoy reading. You can read more about this incident on their blog.

This is a cautionary tale and a reminder to read what you agree to. It may be inconvenient, but I would argue it is worth a delay to get yourself out of an unfair agreement. And hey, maybe you will find some weird corporate joke in the process. If you do, feel free to reach out to me; I am always interested in the humor of the corporations that rule our lives.